Many wireless terminals connected to a wireless communication network such as smartphones or tablets are often capable of running multiple applications (such as apps) simultaneously. Today, a vast amount of these applications utilize some kind of data connection to functionalities or services residing on servers accessed via the Internet in order to occasionally or periodically be updated with information, and/or get access to additional functionality. Since most of these applications are triggered and run independently on the wireless terminal this often results in a situation in which a wireless terminal repeatedly connects to the wireless network in order to transmit and receive data over longer periods of time. This will often lead to the wireless terminal having one connection set up for each application.
This means that the wireless communication network is forced to deal with a lot of separate and impromptu session setups and shutdowns, as well as many parallel ad hoc data transmissions. Also, considering that the wireless network has many individual users with wireless terminals that run multiple applications, it is easy to see that there is quite a lot of unsynchronized data traffic that needs to be handled.
As there may be little or only small amounts of data transmitted, this means that the resources of the network are used excessively and not in proportion to the task. From a network point of view this is undesirable, because communication resources are being unnecessarily occupied by a wireless terminal. These resources may be better used, for instance by other wireless terminals, especially if the demand for resources is higher than the supply.
However, it may also be negative from the point of view of the wireless terminal. In the above-mentioned situation, the wireless terminal uses a lot of energy only to keep the separate connections in place, without any or only little data being exchanged with the wireless network. There is therefore an unnecessary energy usage that it may be of interest to reduce, especially since many wireless terminals are battery powered.
There is therefore a need for reducing the resources used by a wireless terminal in a wireless communication network communicating with server devices.